The point that has been missed in the great knaidel (knaydel? kneidel? kneydl?) controversy is that the real problem isn’t the spelling of Yiddish words in Latin characters. It’s the spelling of English words in Latin characters. In the Hebrew characters that are native to it, Yiddish has been, for the most part, ever since…
Frieda Danziger of Manhattan writes to ask whether I have ever encountered the Yiddish term farfl un lokshn as a comical or disparaging way of referring to the Stars and Stripes. I have, once, in a poem by Abraham Liessin, a well-known Yiddish poet. Liessin, who was born in Russia in 1872 and came to…
‘What’s Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?” The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Stephens asks in a column in which he concludes that, following President Obama’s Syrian chemical weapons shuffle, the president’s promise to keep Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon has lost its credibility. Was Stephens suggesting that “Fuhgeddaboudit” is an English version of an original Yiddish expression?…
Forward reader Susan Rogol writes: “I receive many invitations to the ceremony of cutting the hair of a boy who has reached the age of 3, and I do not understand why it is referred to as an ‘upsherenish’ rather than an ‘upsheren.’ I always associate the Yiddish suffix “-nish” with something negative, as in…
Last week’s column left you hanging in suspense about the Yiddish word nebekh, whose last consonant is pronounced like the “ch” in “Bach.” Forward reader Howard Schranz, you will recall, spoke of having it “thrown his way” after his father’s death when he was a child, and he wanted to know whether it meant, as…
Howard Schranz wants to know the origin and exact meaning of the Yiddish word nebekh. “When I was 11,” he writes, “after my father, a”h, died, I heard a lot of nebekh thrown my way. I know it meant something like, ‘It’s pitiful,’ and I quickly tired of being called that. Show some sympathy if…
What or who is a Schmuck anyway?
When does a word borrowed from another language officially become a member in good standing of American English? Some might say that this happens only when it is included in the dictionaries. Yet new dictionaries are not published every day, and even when they come out, they often overlook words that have been regarded for…
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